A/N For the benefit of those who don't know, there's a Facebook group for Chuck Fanfiction, and we'd love to have some new members.
We'll get back to the Gobbler soon, but first we're taking a detour into CAT Squad territory.
"She's a psychopath!"
"Have you considered eloping?"
"Got that covered."
"A new car."
Verbanski Corp. tower, last week...
Morgan Grimes was bored. Even as a C&C specialist he was still the junior guy, and he got the crap jobs, like monitor duty at headquarters. All weekend. Even the guys walking the floor had more fun.
He pulled out his phone and sent a message. This sucks.
A few minutes later his phone chimed, and he checked the screen. Yes it does. That's the job.
He waited until Four entered the stairwell before tapping out a quick Does it have to?
It was a while before an answer came back. What do you have in mind?
Somewhere in the world, this week...
It would have been simplest, fastest, and a dead giveaway, for Rebecca Franco to have made her way to Brazil on a Volkoff Industries private jet. The fastest commercial flights would have taken the wanted terrorist through a few different European airports. The flights that avoided those airports took days, with multiple stopovers for fueling, changes to other planes, and lots of other annoying delays. She wasn't known for handling annoyances very well.
The woman sitting in the chair in the crowded waiting room discovered that, when Rebecca stopped in front of her chair – black hair, black glasses, black clothes – and stared at her. She tried to pretend like she was reading her trashy romance novel, but the pages quivered. She slapped the book down, grabbed her bags from the chair next to her, and put them on a floor, waving Rebecca to the seat next to her with an angry gesture.
Rebecca tilted her head down slightly, allowing the woman to...see her point of view. Both of them. The woman paled, grabbed her bags, and fled.
Rebecca took her place, slipping the small flat case from under the arm of the chair where the other agent had hidden it. She folded her hands demurely in front of her, slipping the case inside one of her black leather gloves, and radiated an aura of menace so strong no one tried to sit in the one empty seat in the room.
Far away, in another quarter of the world, another woman was engaged in a mission of her own. It had taken days to plan, but she had days, long empty days. Full of vengeance, but vengeance is a very empty thing, like a bucket full of holes.
The office was empty on the weekends, mostly. There were guards, of course, there were always guards. Her objective guarded others, it would surely guard itself. The teams that got that duty were usually a mix of7 more experienced personnel with some trainees, learning the ropes the boring way.
Bored guards are useful guards. She thought about warning her boss, back in the day, but even then she'd been aware that players in this game switched sides, and stupid details like that could come in handy.
Verbanski tower, this week...
"Okay, Four, turn around."
On his screen Bravo Four took his hand off the handle to the stairway door, turned and faced the camera in the ceiling. "I just did this floor!"
Morgan checked the list. "And you're gonna do it again, in reverse this time. Six will leapfrog you, and Three will leapfrog him."
Four started walking. "Who came up with this plan?"
"Nobody did, Four, that's the beauty of it. It's a program that uses the building plan to create mostly random patterns. We've been testing it out just floor to floor, but the 2.0 is almost ready. If it works like I think it will, we'll GPS you through every floor, every night."
"Sounds like a lot of work for nothing, dude."
"Not nothing, Four," said Morgan. "It's keeping me from falling asleep in my chair as my eyes glaze over."
"What are you even listening to him for, Grimes?" said One, who'd been monitoring Morgan's channel. "You know he just likes to complain."
"I do, Chief," said Morgan, "And you know what I haven't been hearing? Four complaining." Four had mastered the art of the sub-vocalized mutter. "I want to hear him complain, it means he's paying attention." So he can have things to complain about.
"It's your ears."
Morgan laughed. "Not really, One," he said. "I put an alert on Four's microphone. If it's working and he stops muttering for more than ten seconds it pings me."
"God-damn, Grimes," said Four. "Now you're making me feel all self-conscious."
"Take a left there, you'll get over it. Those offices all interconnect."
On the screen Four turned left, and walked through a doorway. "Great, now I gotta see what a bunch of slobs these guys are..."
One's sound meter spiked as he laughed. "Good call, Grimes."
"All part of the service."
"Where do you want me to go next?"
In Brazil...
Rebecca Franco stared up at the marquee for the Soco Na Garganta nightclub, bright and flashy like the club itself. She'd stick out out like a sore thumb in there.
She went around the back, so she could get to the roof. Nightclubs had to have air conditioning, and that meant vents.
The woman in black crawled through the ductwork of the building, well aware that every access point was monitored even if the more active scans were shut down, and determined to spend no more time in it than she had to. They didn't even use these vents, not for heating. Verbanski just kept it around for recruits to train in, having made sure all the important offices were on other floors.
Of course, some people have different definitions of 'important' than others.
After disabling the alarm, she poked a dental mirror through the vents and checked for guard patrols, not expecting to see any. She saw nothing, and smirked, behind her mask.
Satisfied that the coast was clear, she opened the vent and exited to the corridor, closing it behind her. The offices were all open so wandering guards could flash a light as they passed, and this made it easy for her to flash a light until she found the desk she was looking for.
She reached into her bag and pulled out her poisoned bait, then slipped into the office, left it in position, and slipped out again. Objective One was accomplished.
She headed for the stairs.
Chuck set his bowl of cereal down on the kitchen table. It was kind of late for cereal, but his schedule was all upside-down with Sarah so far away, so he was having breakfast after dark. He was still there with his food, listening to the latest communications, when Orion called. "Sarah contacted you?"
"Of course not," said Chuck. That wasn't his role in all of this. "This is Carina, reporting the successful handoff of our little package." The laptop squealed. "Okay that was her saying 'what the hell has Sarah done to herself?' Or she's buying a new car. It's a tricky language, the first made more sense in the context."
"Why use this protocol?" asked Orion. Carina could have called from a pay phone if she'd wanted. If there had been any pay phones where she was.
Chuck took a second to think about it, crunching on his marshmallow bits thoughtfully. "One of the first things she ever said to me was how she liked to take whatever Sarah wanted," he said. "I'm guessing this is just another example of that same competitive spirit." Taking contact with him, rather than him.
"You know Sarah would kill to be able to talk to you directly."
Just like Mom. And he would...well, maybe not kill, to hear it. "That too." Probably be best not to mention it to Sarah, when the time came.
"Maybe you should have used somebody else as a courier..."
Not after she heard about the engagement. "We needed someone Sarah could recognize without signals. Not to mention Carina would have killed – Okay, she wouldn't have killed me, but I didn't want to put some other poor agent at risk."
"She's in favor?"
Actually, well, hmm. She hadn't really said anything either way, had she? "Hard to tell. She said she'd tell Amy, and that was all I heard. She didn't mention anyone else."
"You have a last name on this 'Amy'?"
"No." His father – Orion sounded curious. That could be bad. "Dad, what are you going to do?"
"You told me the CATs ended badly," said Orion. "I'm not about to let Carina or anyone else bring that unhappy ending into your new beginning."
The woman in black grabbed the handle of the door to stairwell 2 and pulled. The door stuck, taking her only a little by surprise, and she immediately pulled harder. On the other side was a young man, flashlight in hand and anything but a bored expression on his face. "In–!"
She grabbed him before he could get another syllable out and pulled, helped by his lack of balance as he was practically falling into the room already. She threw him against the far wall and kicked him in the head.
He slumped, maybe dead, maybe not, but she had no time to check.
A person standing in the alley would have heard a lot of gunfire. They would have seen Rebecca Franco burst out the back door of the nightclub even as a herd of terrified patrons flooded out the front. Augusto Gaez' back took the brunt of the impact, his unconscious form slung over her shoulder. She staggered toward the mouth of the alley, desperate to find a place to stash him until she could figure out what to do with him.
Someone stepped out of the shadows. "Sunglasses at night, really?" said Amy.
Echo Park...
"Who the hell is that?" said Chuck, watching the image he was getting from his father's system.
"Working on it," said Orion.
Chuck's phone started to warble.
Rebecca stopped. "You are American? CIA? DEA?"
Amy held up her weapon, all the ID she needed, there and then. "I work for a lot of people."
Sarah took off her glasses. Her eyes glowed, bright yellow irises with little red skulls. Chuck had thought a whack job like Rebecca Franco deserved some kind of whack job fetish, like all the good villains. For Rebecca it was contact lenses. As a plus, the little cameras inside the skulls transmitted everything she saw.
Amy must not have read the file. She gasped. "What kind of sick bitch are you?"
"At least I am not a traitor."
Amy smirked. "Better to be the betrayer than the betrayed." She raised her gun, taking aim. "Too bad he's out, now I'll never have a chance to say gnnh."
Amy fell down, a large wine bottle falling to the ground next to her. A woman stood behind her, a phone in her hand instead of a trashy romance novel. "Stop," she said, calmly, and in Portuguese. "Police."
Rebecca dumped the body of Augusto, his head hitting the fallen bottle and sending it rolling as she turned and ran. Behind her, Carina walked up to her unconscious prisoners. "Damn," she said mildly, in English. "She got away."
She pulled a couple of pairs of handcuffs out of her pockets, knowing that Chuck would be sending backup, and put them to use. She put Amy's gun in her pocket, and dragged her prisoners into whatever was making that smell in the dark, in case anyone tried to follow in Sarah's wake. Leaving them to sit in it she waited and watched, gun in hand.
"Bravo Six, repeat," said Morgan, who had seen the spike in his output and heard a noise, rather than anything intelligible. "Bravo Six, do you copy?" He checked the monitors, in case Six' transponder had failed completely. A quick scan of all those monitors showed no one and nothing. Morgan slammed his hand down on the button. Alarms blared, which should get Six' attention if nothing else did. "Gentlemen, we have a failure to report. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill."
Meaning it wasn't one of his drills. It could be one of the boss'. It could also be Six sitting in the can with a faulty transmitter, but Morgan knew which way to bet. "Three, you should be closest, Four, you're next. Converge on the holodeck." Meaning the configurable training module, but 'holodeck' had the rule of cool working in its favor.
As a target, though, it kind of sucked.
Gertrude's voice came on the line as he was shifting the others to new places. "Bravo Five, report."
"Possible intruder on the holodeck, ma'am," said Morgan, wishing the circumstances were better for a line like that. From the inside it wasn't nearly as cool. "We have a failure to report." And Six had said 'in' or something close to it.
"Six is down and out, control," said Three. "There's a hole in the wall shaped like his face, opposite stair Two."
Morgan winced. Still, it could have been worse. 'Down and out' was better than 'down and done'. "You heard?" he asked, listening to One moving people to stair two while he was on the line with the boss.
"Yes. Must've used the ducts."
"Yes, ma'am, Sorry, ma'am," said Morgan, knowing that it was his own fault. "I should have had active scan on in there while testing the new program."
"Live and learn, Bravo Five. Find the intruder and keep them alive until I get there."
"Tasers only, yes ma'am." He heard Bravo One pass it on. "And after that?" Should he activate more corpsmen? Call an ambulance?
"We'll see."
Okay, maybe a hearse.
A/N2 Did anyone pick up on the 'trashy romance novel' line and figure out it was Carina? I wasn't sure if I wanted to try and keep it a secret or not.
Who can name a movie where a whack job villain had a creepy fetish? Anyone?